Forget all that twaddle about Birmingham being fat and dumb, racist, backward and bumbling.

What Birmingham really is -- at least according to the number-crunching of a dating website that claims to have invented "the Modern Sugar Daddy" -- is hot and bothered.

And bothered and bothered and bothered again.

Birmingham, if this analysis is to be believed, is some kind of promiscuity paradise. Especially if you have money to throw around.

SeekingArrangement.com claims 70 percent of "wealthy men" in Birmingham - actually sugar daddy clients of theirs -- reported having more than seven sexual partners a year, making them far more lecherous than the considered national norm.

Daddy, as it turns out, has a big family.

In fact, if you believe the site that proudly claims to be hook people up in "mutually beneficial relationships," Birmingham ranks as the No. 2 most promiscuous city in America.

Finally. The recognition we deserve.

Birmingham is sluttier than every city but Chicago, the Randy City. It is more lascivious than Las Vegas, Oklahoma City or Atlanta, the rest of the top five.

Now, I wouldn't begin to vouch for the veracity of these numbers, any more than I could vouch for any outfit that brags that it created the terms "sugar family" and "sugar lifestyle."

But if true - which I really don't doubt in the libidinal Bible Belt - it's just another warning for a place that never wants to hear it.

If you get around like that, it's gonna get around. Like that.

Remember that Birmingham last decade almost made a name for itself as a sexually transmitted disease capital.

In 2006 it was the nation's leader in syphilis cases. When the health department began its public awareness campaign the mayor at the time worried that ads urging safe sex in the Infected City might be bad for business.

STD Central, he figured, was not an approved Convention and Visitor's Bureau selling point.

But Jefferson County fought back against the syphilis outbreak anyway, and by 2009 was lauded by some as a national leader for how to do that. It recognized the disease early, issued alarms and limited the damage.

But we did not learn our lessons, it seems.

Not the wealthy with their website sugar babies, or the regular folks with their regular faults.

We still have as many problems from unprotected sex in this town as we have hang-ups about sex in the first place.

Sex may be the first thing on our collective minds. Safe sex is a dirty word.

In 2009, when Jefferson County began to get a handle on its syphilis situation, the county claimed 22 percent of all the state's STD infections. Last year the county, home to 14 percent of the people in this state, had 21 percent of its STD.

One step forward and more steps back.

While syphilis cases in Jefferson County dropped almost 30 percent between 2009 and last year, overall sexually transmitted diseases have risen 10 percent.

Gonorrhea cases rose 30 percent in Jefferson County and 22 percent across the state. Although the incidence of new cases of HIV/AIDS across Alabama dropped a smidge since '09, the number of total cases rose 6 percent.